Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

The emotional or spiritual essence in man is as much respected by idealism as his body and his intellect. Loyalty to actual feelings as they well up spontaneously in the heart, rather than mere conformity to custom, is the modern attitude in all spheres of voluntary life. Personal conduct is a truer mirror of individual feeling than it used to be. What a contrast the student of literature observes between the conventional worldliness of eighteenth-century manners and morals and the intense individualism of the early nineteenth-century poets in England and of our own transcendentalist writers—an individualism which was the logical outcome of the idealist’s championship of human emotion in and for itself. The greatest men are of course always ahead of their age, but such sturdy, independent lives as Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, Darwin’s, George Eliot’s, Stevenson’s, would have created even more consternation in the eighteenth century than they did in the nineteenth, dimly stirred to freer ideals. The same regard for emotional verities that has so deepened individual life is producing a revolution in all social relations. They are constantly becoming more spontaneous and genuine—less matters of tradition. Class boundaries are being obliterated, a man’s success and position coming to depend less on family and station, more on the man himself. Women’s economic progress, combined with an increasing sense in both women and men of the real sacredness and responsibility of love between the sexes, is making marriage, in many ways the most vital of all social relations, a free and joyful bond between equals, rather than a yoke imposed by egotism and endured by helplessness. In sum, the democratic ideal is substituting, in all social relations, the genuine inner cohesion for the artificial mortar and cement of external usage. Finally, it is the same regard for inner realities, so characteristic of idealism, that is giving to men’s religious experience a new profundity. When once the heart is awakened, it needs no longer the assurance of antique books that God exists, and it can worship him no longer as a mere formula, universal because featureless. Intuition supplants revelation, and men enter into a personal relation with the God they had before conceived as austere, characterless, and remote. Modern nonconformity is an indication of the reality of modern religious feeling.

In countless ways we thus discern the working of the idealistic impulse in our contemporary life. Independence in personal conduct and thought, democracy in social relations, nonconformity in religion, stand out as salient features of the modern world, especially when we contrast them with the conventionality, paternalism, and ecclesiasticism of the mediæval.

The foregoing remarks, together with the reflections they will suggest to the reader, may perhaps suffice to show that idealism has met at least one of the requirements of human progress, by filling the mind with a vastly richer and more various mass of contents than mysticism admitted. The realities it takes account of are far less pathetically inadequate to match the actual richness of experience than the thin, impalpable, and austere conceptions of the mystic. Compared with his, the world of the idealist is a breathing, moving world, not entirely void of the infinite tragedy and comedy of life itself. Something of passion and pathos it has, and it is held in shape by the tough fibres of commonplace—for even the trivial is not excluded. All this increase of complexity, however, would be quite nugatory were a principle of unity lacking. The complexity must be built into an order if it is to be truly a synthesis, satisfying to the mind as well as to the sense of reality.

It is, therefore, a fact of capital importance, that idealism does succeed in unifying, as well as in enriching, our conceptions of life. It systematizes, at the same time that it broadens, our views. Much as it insists on the variety of experience, even more does it assert its organic unity. Indeed, the central ideal of idealism, its very heart of hearts, is its belief in the wholeness, the organized integrity, of the universe. It respects the body, the mind, and the soul of man; but even more it respects the whole man, in just balance and full inward cooperation of functions. Believing man to be an organism, it sets supreme store by his full or organic activity, and deplores undue prominence in any element of his life, as injuring the harmony of the whole. Ardently as it champions individual initiative, it demonstrates, through philosophy, that the very consciousness of the individual is dependent on his social relations.[17] It recognizes that democracy can exist only through mutual service, and that freedom is based on a universal sense of responsibility. It is clearly aware that a personal relation with God comes only to him who is willing to obey God, not in a spirit of passive endurance, but with active joy, as a part serving the whole in which it has its being. This recognition of a just relation to the whole as the supreme ideal of all partial existences is testified to most strikingly by our very vocabulary, the natural repository of our beliefs. The word “health,” denoting physical well-being, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “hal,” or whole; “sanity,” signifying mental well-being, is from the Latin word for the same idea, “sanus;” and we name the most indispensable of moral traits “integrity.” True idealism is in no way more certainly to be distinguished from its sentimental counterfeits than by its constant recognition that the preservation of the wholeness, as well as the fullness, of man’s nature, is the sine qua non of human welfare. It values every least manifestation of his nature, because it considers each one sacred; but it values even more the coordination and harmony of all.

Turning from the consideration of idealism in its general effect on modern life to examine its more special effect upon art, we recognize at once its importance as an æsthetic force. Art is the expression of man’s physical, emotional, and spiritual life, in organized fullness. Wherever there is direct, complete, and beautiful expression of what seems to man precious, there is art. Wherever, on the contrary, there is suppression of any genuine human impulse, in fancied service to some other, as in the case of mediæval mysticism, there is artistic immaturity or arrest; and wherever there is an exaggerated development of any one impulse, at the expense of others and of the balance or symmetry of all, as in the cases of modern French realistic literature and of program music, for example, there is artistic decadence. And since idealism insists both on the claims of all legitimate human impulses to recognition, and on their submission to adjustment in the interests of a rounded human nature, idealism is a potent stimulus to true art.

All this is amply illustrated in that great development of art under the spur of idealism which we name the Renaissance. By renaissance, or rebirth, is meant a reawakening of the human spirit to fuller activity, an increased recognition of its native dignity and value as transcending all artificial sanctions and limits. The renaissance period was, as it were, the adolescence of humanity. It was the time of putting away childish things—passive dependence on authority, superstition, timorous conventionality—and of asserting the freedom and the responsibilities of men. In the race, as in the individual, it was primarily an internal event, which reached external expression only with difficulty and after a struggle. The youth has his vague internal sense of the sacredness of his convictions long before he can work these out into the fabric of actual life. A long fight with stubborn customs, with indifferent circumstances, must take place before ideals can become actualities. Just so, the idealism of the race had to meet in mortal combat a thousand opposing conditions, had to conquer its foes and acquire its ways and means, before it could victoriously express itself in art. In other words, feeling had to enter into and transform technique in order that the art might voice fully the impulse that animated it. When we speak of the renaissance, therefore, we mean no narrow, special period of time, precisely dated, like a battle or a treaty. We mean a new spirit of liberty and self-respect in the human mind, which expressed itself in one way at one time, in another at another, according to the facility and promptitude with which it acquired mastery over these ways. The expression followed the effort only after a long interval, and different expressions came at different epochs, far apart in time. In a general way we may say that the Renaissance has occupied the centuries of our era from the fourteenth to the one in which we live. But each art has also had its special period of development, reaching in its own good time the goal of its own particular efforts, under the conditions of its own peculiar medium.

There are as a rule several successive stages in the evolution an art thus undergoes under the spur of idealism. First there is the vague inner sense of a new weight of meaning to be expressed, fresh insight or intuition that demands utterance. Men awake to the true value of those inner impressions and feelings which have so long been smothered under conventions and the worship of the external. They know not what to do with them, how to voice them; but they have at least what Stevenson calls “that impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship aground, which is one of the agonies of youth.” This may be called the period of the fresh insight. Then comes the period in which some sort of technical medium is arduously developed for the expression of the new impulse. This period, in which a vast work must be done by patient experiment, by slow adaptation, without standards and without models, is necessarily long and laborious. Often the prompting insight is almost forgotten in the toil, and the initial passion seems to be lost in dry formalism and pedantry. But all the while ways and means are being invented, problems solved, and traditions established, even as, while the youth toils at desk or plough or counter, forgetful, for the moment, of the ideals that sent him thither, habits are being formed, mastery is being acquired. The period of technical equipment, then, if it be properly conducted, leads over into the period of achievement, in which the original impulses are adequately expressed by means of the acquired skill. This is the time of consummation, of maturity, of balance between the means and the ends of expression. Such was the age of Pericles in Greek sculpture, the age of Sophocles in Greek drama, the Elizabethan age in English drama, the age of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Italian painting, the age of Wordsworth and Keats in English lyric poetry. Unfortunately, the period of maturity is generally followed by still another period, in which the original impulse overshoots its mark and becomes embodied in distorted, grotesque, and unbeautiful forms. So weak is human nature that it can seldom recognize justly its own value without going further, without precipitating itself into the pitfall of over-valuation, pride, and arrogant self-assertion. The balance of all the elements of art to which idealism aspires is then lost; special elements become preponderant, special effects are made fetishes, and degeneration ensues. Ripeness leads over into decay; wholeness or sanity is lost, and partiality paves the way to disintegration.

Mediæval painting, for example, was exceedingly rigid, dry, and conventional. The effort of the ecclesiastical painters was merely to symbolize religious truths; they were like chroniclers, who aim at narrating facts, rather than like ballad-writers and minstrels who are interested also in the beauty of their language, the richness, charm, and intrinsic appeal of their images and phraseology. But by imperceptible degrees, led on by the natural human delight in shapeliness of form and luxury of color, and learning to make the skill acquired in delineation subserve the higher and more immediate purposes of art, the painters of the Renaissance gradually substituted for this merely symbolic treatment a broader one, in which human beauty was as much sought as religious edification. The nude figure was lovingly studied, not because the saints happened to be men, but because men are beautiful. Garments, draperies, fabrics received a new attention, in the interests, not of historical accuracy, but of the intrinsic pleasantness of textures and tints. Postures were softened, adjusted, made less angular and uncompromising than in the almost chart-like early frescoes. Atmosphere, chiaroscuro, composition, balance, were deemed worthy of the efforts of painters who considered art an end in itself. Eventually, by the great pictures of the Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan masters, all the human faculties were called into harmonious activity; the eye was delighted, the feelings were wooed and stimulated, the imagination was touched and informed. “Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority,” says J. A. Symonds,[18] “instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, [art] really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to prove the untenability of the mediæval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.” Whether painting, which thus by insistence on the intrinsic values of its medium attained maturity, then carried the process too far, and lost roundness and balance by prizing mere richness of color above all else, whether, in a word, its consummation was followed by a decadence, is a question too large for discussion here. But it is beyond doubt that painting went through the first three phases of growth pointed out as the results in art of an idealistic impulse.

In the same way, the story of music from the beginning of the seventeenth century up to Beethoven, or throughout that section of its history in which we are at present interested, was essentially the story of a renaissance, or novel artistic development, under the spur of idealism. Looking at it from the vantage-point now reached, we easily trace its evolution through the several regular stages. In the Florentine reformers’ abandonment of old conventions and their half-conscious aspiration towards a new utterance, we discern the first stage of the movement, that of the novel impulse; in the steadfast and efficient delving away at technical methods, at the involutions of harmony, counterpoint, and form, which characterized many of the later composers of the seventeenth century, and occupied much of the attention of even such men as Haydn and Mozart, we trace the second stage, that of equipment; and in the glorious works of Beethoven, who set the keystone in the arch, we find the stage of consummation and fulfilment. Springing from the foundation of the mystical art of Palestrina much as modern Italian painting sprang from the foundation of mediæval religious delineation, the art of Pure Music reached, in the masterpieces of Beethoven, its maturity.